Most Americans associate summer’s three-day bank holidays with barbecues, trips to the beach and  family vacations.

I think of corpses.

Not that I am morbid or have a desire to work as an undertaker.  I simply had a recurring assignment early in my journalistic career to keep track of fatal car accidents on New York state highways each Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day weekend.  And I had fun doing it.

Working out of United Press International bureaus in Rochester and Buffalo in the 1980s, I was the only staffer on duty  between New York City and Cleveland Sunday mornings.  My task was to scan newspapers and check in with UPI’s stringer network — friendly news people at local TV and radio stations  across the Empire State — for the day’s top stories.   UPI paid $40 per story, though the company’s numerous bankrupcty filings made the promise of receiving a non-rubber stringer check a running joke.

On the long  holiday weekends, UPI’s state and national wires  kept a tally of the number of people killed in auto wrecks.  We called this the CAX count, an acronym that meant something like car accidents or casualties.   The National Safety Council, an advocate for seatbelt use, would make a prediction about how many unfortunate drivers, passengers and pedestrians would expire between midnight Friday and the end of travel period on Monday.

Vincent Toffany, who headed the safety council, understood that the news cycle was typically very slow on these weekends.  His organization received branding and reinforcement of their messaging.  The American Automobile Association used this release-news-when-it’s dead approach, too, as did gasoline price survey author Trilby Lundberg.

What used to infuriate UPI’s archrival, The Associated Press, is when our prowess on the telephones with state police or stringers would yield an extra victim or two.  In some cases, UPI would be a tad liberal by counting a drunk who died by falling off a highway overpass or the victim of a pre-holiday crash who succumbed after the clock struck midnight.  AP usually relied on “electronic carbon” stories from its member newspapers, which meant AP broadcast subscribers in New York got late, stale news.

In any event, the UPI totals got a helluva lot more airtime and print coverage because I had a higher CAX count every time.

With UPI a shell of its old self — it’s now owned by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and its News World Corporation, publisher of the Washington Times — and Reuters and Bloomberg doing a nice job with international and business news, there’s little traditional wire service competition for AP in the United States.  But demand for content among local print and broadcast outlets is down, too, as they lose audience and advertisers to an increasingly fragmented online media landscape.

The Associated Press still makes a significant amount of money off its 50 state reports, thanks to correspondents covering legislative news in statehouse bureaus and a policy not to display the content online, where it could be pirated.  But a reduction in the size of AP’s editorial staff and similar news cutbacks among media outlets that used to feed items to AP, has left huge holes in coverage.

What’s filling the gap? Regional newspapers are banding together to form cooperatives that may make even AP state reports unnecessary in the years ahead.  The Ohio News Organization is one such effort.   Politico also represents a significant threat, as it readily barters editorial coverage of Washington news for advertising inventory in local media outlets and web sites.

There are also some dark horses in coverage of the nuts-and-bolts local news.  Atlanta-based CNN has its own editorial staff plus a large network of domestic radio and television affiliates that both broadcast content from and contribute news to CNN.  The so-called CNN Wire has not yet become a comprehensive state-level news service, but it could.

Not surprisingly, newcomers without legacy business hindrances seem to be doing a fine job breaking news locally and globally.   The micro-local Watertown, NY, site Newzjunky is kicking the digital ass of the century-old Watertown Daily Times and making money by selling advertising.

Twitter is the no-cost platform through which the Dutch news service Breaking News Online reaches the majority of its 1.1 million followers, though it is also emailing and using RSS.  In a short time, BNO has gone from solely aggregating third-party news content in under 140 characters to a growing amount of original reporting.  While there’s no apparent revenue model, it wouldn’t surprise me to see local, state, national and vertical beats pop up under the BNO brand as consumers get hooked on digesting tweets and SMS headlines.

The word “wire” is less about a strand of copper these days.  I think of it as an acronym — World Instantly Reached Electronically — and relish the fact that so many content producers are joining in the fun.

The rabbit-ears television antenna is the only way our family stays tuned into the world during summer vacation.

In a tiny cottage in a working class neighborhood of Rhode Island’s South County this past August, no cable TV meant watching Michael Phelps and other Olympians through a veritable blizzard of static on NBC affiliate WJAR, Channel 10, in Providence, located 35 miles to the north.

Things will be different this coming summer. I will be able to re-aim that antenna until I’m blue in the face, and still the screen will be blank. Unless, that is, I take the time to buy and install a digital-to-analog converter for the cottage’s TV.

It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of television watchers will be faced with dead air on February 17 — less than four weeks from today — unless Congress acts to force the Federal Communications Commission to delay the powering down of every analog transmitter at U.S. television station.

Never mind the Israeli-Hamas war and the broadening scandals with Bernard Madoff’ and Rod Blagojevich, President Obama’s first real test in office will be whether he allows the electorate to lose Vanna White’s nightly letter turning. Unless the voters/viewers subscribe to cable, Verizon FIOS, DirecTV or Dish Network, they need to have purchased an HDTV or analog-to-digital converter box or it will be dead air time.

In recent days, Consumers Union threw its support behind a bill co-sponsored by lawmakers whose committees oversee the FCC — Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. — to delay until June 12 the switch to digital.

The three big broadcast television networks certainly want to see the HDTV switchover day delayed so they can postpone further slippage of their influence. Cable stations and Internet news sites surged in popularity during the last elections-fueled ratings sweep.

Even though the overall number of people watching the network evening newscasts fell by 280,000 viewers in Nielsen Media Research’s fall ratings period, ABC, CBS and NBC together still accounted for some 23 million watchers.

The fact that a sizable number of those viewers — those whose TVs receive their signal from the airwaves — have not plunked down $50 to $75 to buy a converter is major reason to delay pulling the plug. Those close to the TV business argue that consumers are stupid procrastinators who either missed the millions of public service announcements or made a conscious decision to ignore the Feb. 17 hard stop.

Consumers Union contends that a federal government bungled a program to dole out coupons that defray the cost of the digital upgrade.  There’s also an argument that poor people and elderly people who do not have technical skills to rejigger their TV sets’ antenna systems, have not received enough hand holding.  One very funny PSA on this topic features an octogenarian who would benefit handsomely from a visit by Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

One additional wrinkle that has developed in the years since the FCC set the Feb. 17 deadline is that a whole bunch of people are now unemployed, unable to pay for cable TV, and sitting around the house watching TV.

It’s on that very same TV they learned from the U.S. Department of Labor that new jobless claims had reached their highest in 26 years with 589,000 individuals filing unemployment claims.

Let those people keep their TVs receiving the networks and, if they are lucky, PBS, and a Paxton station that features all-Waltons weekends.

Even if Obama and Congress let FCC have their way on February 17, some smart marketers (or politician) is going to buy up thousands of analog-to-digital boxes, affix their logo and become the heroes of those who did not manage to upgrade on their own. That’s how friends are made.